2013, encore 5% de scientifiques non convaincus

Climat : « L’industrie intimide les chercheurs »
Reddit’s science forum banned climate deniers. Why don’t all newspapers do the same?
In addition to my career as a PhD chemist, I am one of a select few who enjoy the privilege of moderating content on reddit.com’s science forum.

The science forum is a small part of reddit, but it nonetheless enjoys over 4 million subscribers. By comparison, that’s roughly twice the circulation of The New York Times. The forum, known as /r/science, provides a digital space for discussions about recent, peer-reviewed scientific publications. This puts us (along with /r/AskScience) on the front line of the science-public interface. On our little page, scientists and nonscientists can connect through discussions on everything from subatomic particles to interstellar astrophysics. As a moderator of this discussion, I’ve observed scientific discourse across a wide variety of disciplines.

Summer 2012 is breaking all sorts of records. On the bright side, one benefit of extreme weather is that it wakes people up to the fact the climate is changing. Record high summer temperatures gripping most of the continental U.S. and severe drought conditions appear to be helping Americans connect the dots between climate change and their daily life. The big question, however, remains: what are we going to do about it? In a recent poll conducted by the Washington Post and Stanford University, six in 10 say global weather patterns have become unstable in the past three years and almost as many say average temperatures were higher during the past three years than previously. The poll went on to say that “55% said a ‘great deal’ or ‘good amount’ can be done to reduce future global warming. So why is the U.S. still dragging its feet when it comes to swift and overarching climate policy? Even so, it’s not just the weather that’s troubling, it’s the domino effect.

Related Stories:
Richard Muller: 'Humans Are Almost Entirely The Cause' Of Climate Change. Climate scientists are 95 percent sure that humans are causing global warming. Climate hawks are buzzing over leaks from the fifth big climate report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due to be officially released in September.

Spoiler: Scientists are pretty damn confident that we’re screwing up the climate. An earlier draft was leaked in December by climate deniers trying to undermine the case for anthropogenic climate change. News of more recent leaked drafts comes to us from Reuters, which has no such agenda. Reuters sums up the report this way: Climate scientists are surer than ever that human activity is causing global warming, according to leaked drafts of a major U.N. report, but they are finding it harder than expected to predict the impact in specific regions in coming decades.
97 out of 100 climate scientists agree: Humans are responsible for warming. The Earth revolves around the sun.

Also, it’s overheating because we’re burning fossil fuels. Can you guess which of those two long-established facts just received an additional jolt of publicized near unanimity among scientists? It was, of course, the latter. (The oil industry has no economic interest in attempting to debunk the former, and you can no longer be persecuted for claiming it.) An international team of scientists analyzed the abstracts of 11,944 peer-reviewed papers published between 1991 and 2011 dealing with climate change and global warming. About two-thirds of the authors of those studies refrained from stating in their abstracts whether human activity was responsible for climate change.

The scientists involved with the new study also asked the authors of the peer-reviewed papers for their personal reflections on the causes of global warming. The results of the study were published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.